


The Fire Ships

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Series: Dark Approach [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Everything Hurts and I'm Dying, Gen, Identity Issues, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Past Torture, Prologue, Psychological Torture, Recovered Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 06:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1808722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world burns around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fire Ships

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of prologue to **Dark Approach**. You can read this one without reading that, and vice versa.

Ashes fire dust metal. Melting iron, steel, plastic, flesh. Copper tinge of blood on top of it all.

Metal twists, bends, breaks. It screams around you, in your head. Collapses down on top. Crushing. There’s already pain. More is irrelevant.

The man sees. Looks down from on high. He’s coming to finish you off. 

Don’t blame him.

 _People are going to die, Buck. Please don’t make me do this._ You have no say in the matter. There’s only the mission and you to complete it. No one nothing has ever come as close as this man to making you fail, but now you have. Lying useless, broken.

He was holding out a hand, yelling, “Bucky!” The world flew by so fast, cold snow and mountain cliffs blur, train wheels grinding. A voice that ricocheted off steep canyon walls. Means you failed a mission before. 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_ A memory like an echo, a ghost, but ghosts don’t speak. Old man white shirt grey suit. Operations control command. “You met him earlier this week.” _But it’s mine. My memory._ “Wipe him.” _But it was mine._

Yet it’s still there, like fingerprints on glass. A trace, a fragment, a sliver. Light on the retina when you close your eyes. The recollection of pain long after what causes it has stopped.

But there is always pain. Bone breaks and flesh burns and muscle tears, it’s all so easy. Water in the lungs or stun baton to the belly or electrodes on the head. Stripped and threatened by laughing faces. All the same. There is a line and if you cross it punishment. Hang you upside down, douse with water to make skin more conductive, hit you with the shock prod. Put you in the chair, strap you down, slip the biteguard in, tear it all away.

There was an echo. “Bucky?” Your memory. Yours to take away. Noise in the head grows louder with the name.

The man comes and he’s going to finish the job the ship has started. He could shoot, punch, smash your head in with the heel of his boot. Or just watch while the ship does it. Flames smother; explosions wound, tear, and puncture; metal sears skin. The man stands above you. Then leans down to try to pull the metal beam off. He bleeds from wounds you inflicted, three shots, none to the head or neck, though. You’re a better shot than that. 

_You’re not just the best shot I’ve seen come through here since the war started, son, you’re the best shot I’ve ever seen. You have a natural affinity for this. And what’s more, you have real leadership skills. You keep this up, you’ll be more than just a private by the time you ship out to Europe._

_Sergeant James Barnes of the 107th, shipping out for England._

If he leaves the beam here, it will end. You will end. That’s all right, since you failed the mission. Penalties for failure. 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_ A voice not heard inside your head in...how long? Was it your voice? Where did it come from? Where did it go? Grey suit talks at you, tells you empty stories, takes away your memory even though it isn’t his to take away. But you belong to him, so who are you to complain.

Apparently you are Bucky. Someone this man in the uniform wants to save. He struggles, strains, pulls the beam off just enough to allow escape. It makes no sense to allow your enemy escape. The ship is burning, collapsing. He could have just let it do its job.

“You know me.” If you do know him, can’t keep it. Everything belongs to them. You belong to them. He can’t save you from that, can’t lift the yoke off your neck or unbrand your skin. Can’t undo years of frozen darkness or the falling falling falling. 

“No I don’t!” is safer. What isn’t remembered isn’t a threat. It’s simply survival, a useful strategy. Your mission brief. There are failsafes, like the two-shot gun on your back. But right now you can fight. You know how to fight. 

The ships collide, descend.

“You’ve known me your whole life. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.” He thinks it’s enough, thinks this will help trigger something. But you know the methods, how conditioning works, the function of triggers. Aversion, desensitization, reinforcement, humiliation, punishment. Say your name and the pain gets worse. You’re a ghost and ghosts don’t have names, they don’t have voices. Attempts at autonomy are met with the opposite: force feeding, confinement, deprivation, false consciousness. Every mission has a profile, and going off-profile has consequences. Cage coffin tomb.

Debris scatters, the smoke blinds. There is a memory of saws, blood, men in white coats. An image never seen before, always teasing at the edge of vision, but never known. If it was yours or something false provided by those men. They’ve given you other things as well -- languages, skills, strength. How do you know that you know how to do these things? Bricklayers building you through chemicals, devices, threats. An architecture of pain. A voice imprisoned.

“I’m not going to fight you.” He drops his shield. Do you really remember a shield, a blast? Holding on to cold metal with his face above you, screaming a name. He’s trying to grab your hand. Which hand -- the real one or the metal? No, the metal is not yours. It belongs to them. Same as life.

“You’re my friend.” Whispers of recollections formed in the shape of a face. But with a name. An echo of your name. Then a gun to the head, threatened execution for speaking it. A face, this man’s face, the name and the threat of his death for speaking your own.

The ships burn, crash. Ships of fire. 

_”Fire ships. Why do you have to waste good daylight on this, Stevie? Let’s go outside.”_

_“It’s history, Buck. It’s important. And it’s also my class report, which is due tomorrow. So.”_

_“The English navy? Ugh, really? Boring.”_

_“It’s not. They were outnumbered by the Spanish armada, so Drake sent ships that they’d set on fire toward their ships, while the wind was in their favor. The Spanish knew from experience that fire ships might have explosives on them -- even though most of them didn’t -- so rather than risk being blown up, the Spanish turned and sailed out of the Channel, where they were routed by the English.”_

_“So it’s really about the little guys beating the big guys. There’s a surprise.”_

_“Kinda. But it’s mostly about how the threat of a weapon can be worse than the actual weapon itself.”_

The world burns around them. Disintegrating, ash dust molten metal. Oily taste of gunmetal on the tongue. Hurtling toward catastrophe. The man doesn’t give up, even as the ships blaze. 

But you have a mission, not a friend. Or do you? There is nothing left except the two of you and the ship is going down. “Then finish it. ’Cause I’m with you to the end of the line.”

It cuts, wounds, tears at the skin. Crashes around in your head as the metal collapses in a shrieking wail. The man was silent as you hit him over and over. His skin split and bones crunched. Eye swells but he can still see right through to your weakness. 

The structure underneath collapses and then he is falling with it, down through boiling sky. You hang on this time and he falls. But you don’t say his name. Don’t stretch a hand out toward him. Now you have a choice. Follow him down or stay here till the ship hits water. You hang outside of time and space. Heartbeat kickstarts, hand lets go. 

_Who the hell is Bucky?_ A corpse, a ghost story, a figment of his imagination.

_“Sergeant Barnes. Bucky...this was your nickname, yes? You are improving nicely. You would improve much faster if you stopped fighting. Though I trust our lessons are beginning to take hold. Your pain is rooted in your obstinacy, in refusal to accept your circumstances and obey. This will be the last time anyone calls you by this name. Your friends, the ones who abandoned you, are all dead now. No one knows you any longer. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you will find peace.”_

He drifts through water, unmoving. He saved you on the ship. You could save him now. Off-profile, altered mission. But there is nothing left, the ships have burned, the building has collapsed. Fire melts ice. You could walk away, no punishment. No cold coffin, your unfamiliar face reflected for just a breath before ice obscures it. 

You are a weapon, a ghost, a threat. Silent. But one that has a name. They can’t take it from you this time. There is the known, and now, for the first time, the unknown. You waver for a moment, watching the man catch his breath, deciding. 

The unknown is better.

**Author's Note:**

> Crying with me on Tumblr, [reblogging,](http://teatotally.tumblr.com/post/89209445425/the-fire-ships-prologue-to-dark-approach) all that stuff is always welcome!


End file.
